It is a land of mystery shrouded in mountains, lakes and forests. At the same time it’s rich in resources that promise a bright future. And much more

Whatever major projects are on the books for northern B.C., the tourism value of unspoiled wilderness, such as this scene of the Taku River, cannot be underestimated. Photo by David Nunuk.

Photograph by: David Nunuk

British Columbia’s North is a place of legend and lost souls, of mysteries and miracles, saints and sinners, merchants and miners, dreams, history and hyperbole.

It’s hyped as a treasure box of resources from which endless wealth will pour, paying the province’s way into the future. Furs, gold, timber, wheat, coal, oil, natural gas, grain ports and pipeline terminals have all served in their day as the baubles of promise.

Yet it is simultaneously counter-hyped as a kind of frozen waste, an isolated frontier invaded by back-to-the-land hippies, Bible-thumping fundamentalists, cranky survivalists and crusty eccentrics who get cabin fever or disappear into the wilderness in pursuit of lost gold strikes.

It’s the font of a prosperous future hobbled only by NIMBYISM, backwards indigenes and recalcitrant preservationist zealots. Or it’s a pristine wilderness defiled by polluting mines and pulp mills, drill rigs, seismic lines, hydroelectric projects and the brown scabs of rapacious clearcuts.

The North is neither and it is both — depending upon point of view.

Residents of comfortable suburban homes in Terrace or on state-of-the-art farms surrounding Dawson Creek, faculty from the University of Northern B.C. sipping cappuccinos in Prince George’s emerging café society, newly minted Nisga’a mandarins in New Aiyansh or off-shift oilpatch workers taking the kids for a swim at the spiffy recreational centre in Fort St. John might chuckle at the misconceptions prevalent in the more urban south.

But, of course, there’s a grain of truth in every misconception.

There’s no escaping the recorded fact that B.C.’s North shares Canada’s coldest temperatures and heaviest snowfalls. It has plunged below — 58 C at Smith River, Prince George tops the severe weather index for B.C. and Tahtsa Lake gets an average of 978 centimetres of snow a year, deep enough to bury the top floor of your typical three-storey walk-up in Vancouver. On average, Fort Nelson has snow on the ground for 179 days.

It’s also a place for improbable characters like Simon Gunanoot, the Kispiox outlaw who played Scarlet Pimpernel with the B.C. police for more than a decade, and Nellie Cashman, Angel of the Cassiar, who entered Northern legend when she mushed a dog team through 77 days of dreadful winter weather to save a score of blizzard-stranded prospectors.

Henry “Twelve Foot” Davis, came to the Peace River District as a fur trader but left his indelible mark on the Cariboo gold rush by exploiting a staking miscalculation between two claims that proved precisely as wide as the nickname that inevitably followed and from which he extracted, some say, $30,000 in dust and nuggets.

Not to mention the emu — speaking of eccentric characters — spotted trotting down a road near Prince George a few weeks ago by a gobsmacked trucker who managed to snap a couple of photos with his cellphone.

Historically, the North is the last bastion of the fearsome grizzly — Ursus horribilis horribilis — and white Kermode “Spirit Bears,” of the secretive, stealthy lynx and the wily, ferocious wolverine, of the moose and the endangered mountain caribou.

Perhaps fittingly much of its pristine boreal forests, serene lakes, thundering rivers and rugged mountains are in parks, ecological reserves, protected areas and special management zones.

This is why B.C.’s Wilderness Tourism Association likes to say, “We are the Super in B.C.’s tourism brand Supernatural B.C.”

The North is the homeland of warrior chiefs from the 18th and 19th centuries whose names still inspire awe in the Internet-savvy generation of the 21st century. Along with conventional resources, its First Nations communities eye the enormous potential in cultural sightseeing of the kind that has propelled international tourism to a 250-million job behemoth now contributing 11.6 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product.

Today’s warrior chiefs, like Edward John who was born in Tache on Stuart Lake, pack brief cases, not muskets, and negotiations once conducted for bolts of cloth over bales of beaver pelts now involve Power Point presentations about long-term yields over polished rosewood conference tables.

Still, simply to talk of the North is to conjure images of bush-wise men like the restless wanderer Warburton Pike, John Finlay who turned North where Alexander Mackenzie turned south, the Peace River hunter Pouce Coupe and the Carrier trading chief Kwah, who flitted across the landscape like moccasin-clad ghosts.

Bold explorers like Simon Fraser, who travelled the wild rivers in bark canoes with skins as flimsy as pizza box lids and their successors, the bush pilots. Russ Baker’s Central British Columbia Airways became Pacific Western Airlines and eventually bought CP Air.

And below the radar, surveyors like Frank Swannell, who travelled with little more than a rifle, an axe, a box of instruments, a paddle and a pair of snowshoes. Even journalists, like the unnamed Vancouver Sun reporter that one adventurer encountered poling a canoe down the Parsnip River in search of a story in the Omineca more than 70 years ago.

The story of the North is also a chronicle of women, of bannock and beadwork, of mothers and wives like Mattie Gunterman and Hannah Director sustaining families, of visionaries bringing health and education to traplines, civilizing gold rush camps — and sometimes being debauched by them — and of making rough homesteads function in the face of economic adversity.

Today it’s a narrative of women coming out of tiny northern towns to win gold medals for Canada at the Olympics like Carol Huynh, or earning a PhD at Queen’s like Sarah de Leeuw, winning cabinet posts like Shirley Bond, planting forests, founding businesses, managing ranches and winning national writing competitions.

But it’s also a story with a strain of easy-come, easy-go adventurers, of greed and avarice, of people trying to play God and people trying to hide from God’s sight, of ruthless outlaws and the intrepid citizen lawmen who shot them down, one by one, in a ferocious gunfight on the boardwalk outside the New Hazelton bank they’d just robbed in 1914, a shootout that made the OK Corral look like a picnic outing.

To be honest, exactly what comprises Northern British Columbia is found as much in the imprecise imagination as it is on the map, in atlases, in economic reports and tourist brochures, or in the rhetoric and propaganda advanced by special interests.

For many inhabitants of the conurbation which has come to cover the Fraser Valley and southern Vancouver Island with pavement, concrete canyons and air-conditioned towers of steel and glass, for the folk who seldom venture out into the hinterlands of their immense province, the North might begin at Hope, where the major highways turn north.

From the vantage point of Lower Post on the border that separates B.C. from Yukon, or from Fort Nelson where the highway spur leads on to Fort Liard in the Northwest Territories, what we call the North is more part of the south — and, indeed, there’s some reason for them to think so.

The rest of the North, the mountains, muskegs, rivers and prairies, dense forests and barren ground extend another thousand kilometres. Drive “North” from Fort Nelson to Whitehorse and on to Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea and it takes longer than it does to drive from Vancouver to Winnipeg. So being North is relative.

Generally, though, B.C.’s North is taken to be the geographical region lying above a line that follows the Skeena River inland from Prince Rupert, then continues along the Nechako River to Prince George, then angles south to the Rocky Mountains and McBride.

It includes the prairies of the Peace River district, the glittering summit of Mount Fairweather in the St. Elias Mountains, the lava flows of the Spatsizi Plateau and the Nass Valley, the Northern Rockies that have been dubbed the Serengeti of the North for their abundance of wildlife and the craggy shores and fog-draped rainforests of Haida Gwaii, which droops down to roughly the same latitude as Williams Lake.

It’s an area that if dropped on a map of Europe, would just about cover France. As a region, it’s geographically larger than the entire state of California. You could drop all of Japan into it with a bit of room left over and the entire United Kingdom would take up only half of it. Yet only four main roads and a couple of railways frame this vast Northern wilderness.

The Yellowhead Highway between Jasper, Prince George and Prince Rupert; the John Hart Highway from Prince George to Dawson Creek; the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Lower Post; the Cassiar Highway from New Hazelton to Upper Liard on Yukon border. Inside that rectangle are a few First Nations settlements, gold rush ghost towns, a few mines and exploration camps.

In total, the population of B.C.’s north is about 170,000 — although that number’s disputed by those who would include regions south of Prince George, which inflates the number to about 345,000 — but nevertheless, about 20,000 fewer people than live in Richmond inhabit an area roughly the size of Europe’s fourth largest country.

The snowpack and glaciers on seven major mountain ranges provide the meltwater that seethes through vast watersheds to form some of the continent’s most powerful and dramatic rivers. They carve through the volcanic, mineral-rich bedrock. It was the floury dust, flakes and nuggets of placer gold these rivers deposited in gravel bars that made the North the transformative engine in B.C.’s economic and social history.

But before gold, another kind of wealth brought adventurers — luxuriant furs sought by markets in Asia and Europe.

So B.C.’s first permanent European settlers and entrepreneurs came to the province’s North, following the Peace River and its tributaries through the prairies, mountains and forests of the northeast.

The first permanent and still-occupied settlement on the Pacific Slope north of Spanish California was Fort McLeod, about an hour’s drive beyond Prince George. The first store opened there by the fur traders has been in continuous operation since 1805, although it’s changed locations a few times.

In its day, the fur trade was the biggest commercial enterprise in North America and B.C’s North was its final epicentre, with trading forts springing up on rivers and lakes across the region. They maintained a transportation system that both knit the province together and tied it to Canada in the distant east.

But it was gold that ignited the idea of the North as treasure box of mineral resources. It was kindled by discoveries on the lower Fraser River. A sequence of rushes up the great river’s tributaries commenced. Eventually, stampeders flooded through the Cariboo, the Omineca, the Cassiar, the Stickeen Territory, the Stewart, the Atlin, then on into the Klondike, finally ebbing on the black sands of an Alaskan beach.

Most of the roaring boom camps that followed have dwindled to names on maps for most of us — Toy’s Bar, Germansen’s Landing, Manson Creek, Anyox, Hogem and New Hogem — yet they are the residue of a dawning realization: there’s more to mine than gold! The corrugated landscape that proved so formidable is, indeed, a treasure trove of minerals from antimony to zinc — and it yields other commodities like energy and the wilderness esthetic.

A study in 2003 calculated that more than 70 per cent of B.C.’s export wealth is derived beyond the Lower Mainland and south Vancouver Island, a good proportion of it from the North. In the northeast alone, the BC Business Council estimates industry investment in exploration and development of natural gas grew from $1.1 billion in 1999 to $7.9 billion in 2008. The natural gas sector employs 44,000 British Columbians directly and another 67,000 owe their jobs to it indirectly.

The North has 20 per cent of B.C.’s lumber mills, 35 per cent of its pulp mills and 27 per cent of its paper mills. It produces more than 30 per cent of the hydroelectricity, including almost 900 megawatts available from Alcan’s Nechako reservoir. Mineral resources including molybdenum, gold, silver, copper and coal yielded more than 30 per cent of provincial mining revenues and in 2006 more than 70 per cent of mineral exploration in B.C., valued at $194 million, took place in the North.

How important is this region to B.C.’s growth and prosperity? Pretty darn important.

If the mining industry sees much of its future in the North, workers in the south should note that the average annual earnings in that sector rose to $98,200 in 2012 and the industry expects to add another 16,770 workers in B.C. by 2023.

As for that seemingly intangible commodity, the nature esthetic: the Wilderness Tourism Association points out that the potential of the region’s environmental assets are immense — it says its clients alone spend an average of $1.5 billion a year on nature-based tourism in the province, sustaining 2,200 businesses and providing 40,000 relatively high-value jobs that add more than double the value of the average retail services job.

So the North begins to resemble that mythic treasure box and the box is filled with more than stories, legends, dreams and dramatic characters. In fact, it’s looking a lot like both the industrial powerhouse that visionaries imagined during its fabled past and the sustainable economy of the wilderness nature esthetic that the world increasingly demands.

The test will be whether the North can resolve the tension between the two. Can it develop the one future in resource growth without losing the other future — the value of that pristine wilderness accessible only by horseback, float plane or on foot which will increasingly be its other, perhaps longer lasting, source of wealth.

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